DOH Usec. Maria Rosario Vergeire, FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) said Tuesday that it is looking at whether the positive test results of Interior Secretary Eduardo Año were a “false positive.”
According to Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire, experts at the DOH are studying the case of Año who tested positive again for the disease after his recovery in April.
“Meron pong possibility silang ibinigay. Maaaring una, ito ay false positive o ‘yung una nyang pagkakasakit, ‘yun ang false positive,” Vergeire said in an interview with ABS-CBN’s Teleradyo.
(They enumerated different possibilities for why he tested positive again. First, it could be a false positive test result, or his first infection was false positive.)
“Pangalawa, maaaring may contamination sa (Second, there could be contamination in the) laboratory that’s why this false positive happened,” she added.
The third possibility being eyed by DOH experts is that the positive test results might have only stemmed from the “remnants” of the virus, said Vergeire, noting that the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction testing machines can detect even the “fragments” of the virus.
Vergeire reiterated that COVID-19 patients who have recovered from the disease may still retain these fragments for a long time even if they are no longer infectious.
With Año’s case, Vergeire reminded the public that there is no “immunity passport” from infection to the virus, explaining that the antibodies that develop from recovered patients do not last too long.
Año first tested positive for COVID-19 on March 31 and eventually recovered and got a negative test result on April 13. However, he announced he got tested for the virus on August 14 and received a positive result the following day.
Año was asymptomatic when he first contracted the disease, but for his second infection, he complained of “experiencing flu-like symptoms including a sore throat and body aches.”